> (e.g. put in a separate file, or given a separate > identifier than "T" so that it's excluded from export filters if > necessary, can be acted on to produce curved taxiway lines, etc.)
I think that that could become quite important. I have a great fear that if we ever get round to automatic handling of curved taxiways, and to automatic production of the right textures at taxiway intersection etc, then we don't want to find our taxiway data full of small little metre-long taxiways that gunges the whole place up. I'm very worried by taking the data denoting 'real' taxiways, and adding in lots of small ones. Especially for the AI side of things - a network with masses of small little nodes is going to be very nice, except exceedingly large, and, topologically, irrelevant (except for physical movement of aircraft models). Giles Robertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] > I'm not entirely sure where the acceptable number of segments / amount > of detail trade-off will end up. Jon Stockill has done some very > detailed UK military layouts with hundreds of segments to show all the > dispersal areas, but I don't think he's submitted them yet. So far the > airports I have done haven't had more than about 100 segments, less than > some of the default ones. I deliberately avoided KSQL after seeing the > massive extra aprons on the aerial photos! Hopefully what is acceptable > to Robin in terms of number of segments vs. detail vs. accuracy will > become more clear after I get some X-Plane export filters in and users > start submitting in a format he can accept. Well, for the purposes of getting more stuff in the default area into CVS, and with the possibility that "aesthetic" taxiways might be handled differently (e.g. put in a separate file, or given a separate identifier than "T" so that it's excluded from export filters if necessary, can be acted on to produce curved taxiway lines, etc.), maybe it makes the most sense for me to just forego rounding interesections right now, and instead just get the taxiways and aprons put in place for places I work on? I can always go back and add the curvature (since playing with KSQL, I know I can do it OK), and by that point maybe we'll have settled on how to treat the additional stuff? Of course, I have no idea how to handle KPAO in either case -- its main feature is a large circular apron for a parking area, with a circular taxiway running its circumference. >> Perhaps a better way of handling curved intersection corners would >> be to generate for each intersection a set of four boolean flags >> indicating whether or not that corner should be rounded, and let >> TerraGear round the corners when it puts the taxiways into the scenery? >> But I bet that requires hard work on their part, so maybe not such a >> good idea. > > > It's a good idea, but as you say requires a lot coding in TerraGear as > well. Better handling of taxiway/taxiway and taxiway/runway > intersections is something that's been mulling in the back of my mind > for ages, but realistically I haven't got a chance of finding time to > work on it in the foreseeable future. I understand. At this point, I think the biggest reason I wish I could code (well, in something other than FORTRAN or the bash shell) is because it's gotta be a bit annoying to people in a project for other people (like me) to come in with ideas for *them* to implement. "Wouldn't X be cool? Why don't you go do X?" [ Two quotes from you ] >>>>> There's lots of room for improvement to the airport modelling. I >>>>> guess >>>>> that ultimately artistic orientated folk will start doing custom >>>>> scenery >>>>> for certain areas, rather than relying on the automated processing >>>>> of >>>>> compiled data as we do at the moment. [ snip ] > I hope > that eventually people will start making detailled representations of > their local areas available, in a similar manner to MSFS scenery > designers. Part of MSFS' success at having so many people developing aircraft liveries and a huge quantity of landmarks, accurate airport structures, traffic patterns and gate usage, etc., (seen e.g. in all the stuff on http://www.avsim.com/ and http://www.flightsims.com/ ) is doubtless based on the number of people running it. But I also wonder if another reason is that it's fairly well facilitated. The infrastructure is there, and it's straightforward to use it. My understanding (but I'm not sure; haven't run any MS software since the 80s) is that the software one uses for creating and adding such stuff comes with MSFS, and that the procedure for how to create stuff and how to insert it into the existing scenery/AI/etc. is well-documented. There's little sense of "this is going to take a lot of work just to figure out what *to* do, before actually doing it." And when you've got something you're happy with, there are those websites to make it available to other people, be inspired by what others have done, etc. We have TaxiDraw, which I think is cool, and fgsd, which I haven't really used yet so I don't have an opinion on it. And people are referred to Blender or AC3D for 3-d model creation. But finding these things, learning how to use them properly (with the exception of the TaxiDraw tutorial), etc., doesn't seem so easy. It mostly comes from Googling and mailing list archive searching and so on. For an example, it took a fair bit of searching the mailing list archives to get an idea of how to relate objects created in Blender to the desired physical sizes once placed in FlightGear scenery. And then, once people create stuff and want to make it available to others, and see what others have done, there's no obvious venue for doing that. Even stuff which might get integrated into FlightGear proper (e.g. a bunch of A320s with paintjobs of a bunch of different airlines; or still more buildings for San Francisco, slowing down framerates for all but those with truly fast machines) would probably still have *some* people interested in it. Maybe it'd be worthwhile to have a site like http://scenery.flightgear.org/ or something like that, well-publicized to fgfs users, where people can go to dload scenery creation stuff, read tutorials, upload creations, etc. Maybe that would help develop more interest. Yeah, I know, another idea in search of someone with free time (and, in this case, bandwidth!); although I can imagine helping with this somewhat. -c -- Chris Metzler [EMAIL PROTECTED] (remove "snip-me." to email) "As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel